Question: What do firefighters do most days?

I hope you didn’t say ‘they fight fires’. Firefighters actually fight fewer and fewer fires every year.

Why? Because they spend so much more of their time proactively preventing fires. They install smoke alarms, teach best practice and inspect buildings.

Fire fighters are a great example of how to go from ‘problem solver’ to ‘problem preventer’.

There’s a parallel with inbound customer services. Your contact center is ready and waiting for customers to bring you their problems. They forget passwords, their deliveries get lost, they can’t activate their accounts. They’re the burning buildings your crews rush to.

Even worse are the customers who don’t bring you their problems. They just cancel their orders. They’re the unknown fire hazards that cause value to go up in smoke.

And you can prevent those fires, just by getting creative with your auto dialer.

But how can you know who needs help?

The first objection you might come up with is simple: ‘we don’t know who needs help if they haven’t called us’. But I disagree.

Your customers – especially the loyal ones – want you to go above and beyond. About half of them expect special treatment in return for their loyalty.

There are plenty of signs that someone might benefit from some extra attention. You know when customers are most at risk of churning. You know when a customer is routinely late with payments. You know when a customer commits to a big purchase.

In other words, you have plenty of data on who to call. The real problem is ‘how’. How can you put that data into a call list for your auto dialer?

Who feeds the auto dialer?

The auto dialer’s job is simple. It dials numbers and connects agents.

The benefit is the automation of a lot of time-consuming dialling. But there’s still a lot of time-consuming work involved with creating calls lists.

So wouldn’t it be more helpful to have a dialer that was integrated with your data? It’s totally possible to connect your auto dialer to data from your CRM, your Helpdesk, order management or any other source.

That lets your systems ‘talk’ about customers who are a churn risk, or falling into arrears, or who might be good candidates for feedback. Then, they can automatically schedule calls to those people and save a lot of trouble down the line.

That takes some thankless work off of someone’s plate. More to the point, it creates an exceptional customer service that saves (and makes) money.